Buyer Personas: Who Are Your Customers?

A major part of any marketing or advertising campaign is to give your audience a sense of who you are and what you do. What is the value that you can deliver to them? What makes you different from the next website over that performs a similar service or sells a similar product? Why should they trust you? At the same time, it is important that businesses and websites take the time to get a sense of who their audience is. Who are they? What do they do? What are their needs? Buyer personas help you construct a model of your customer so you can deliver relevant, authoritative content that answers their questions and gets to the root of their needs.

To construct usable buyer personas, you can extract information from the following sources: interviews and surveys or customers, clients, and prospects, in-house data for customer characteristics, website analytics, customer service reports and interviews, keyword research, and social media analytics and monitoring.

Fleshing out your customers will help you in a variety of ways:

• You can target the keywords that actually come up during sales calls, pitches, and other customer contacts. These are the terms people are actually using. You can then further develop your personas based on keyword trends.
• Use Advanced Segments and Secondary Dimensions in Google Analytics to see how landing pages perform with specific keywords and refine.
• You can continually developed more targeted, authoritative content based on keyword input from customers, prospects, analytics reports, and sales teams.
• You can use the information to figure out how best to link to your content. Using a buyer persona, you can visit other sites, blogs, forums, videos, etc., that this buyer frequents. You can get into the conversation (without selling).

Buyer personas are a way to humanising the customer; it reminds us that people are people, and that they have varying needs and wants. To cater to them – and increase conversion rates – we need to know them.